The leading vendors in the WDM ROADM optical hardware market in 2012 include Alcatel-Lucent, Huawei, Ciena, and Fujitsu.

"It’s been a tough road for WSS components these past couple of years, with quarterly revenue down nearly 50% from the highs two years ago," notes Andrew Schmitt, principal analyst for optical at Infonetics Research. “But we believe there’s some modest growth ahead tied to the deployment of new 100G coherent systems and the rollout of colorless, directionless and contentionless (CDC) ROADMs. While the level of interest in CDC ROADMs is very high from vendors, the current pricing premium given to this architecture by equipment vendors will slow adoption."